to establish a public square near the present Battery, without success.[1] After his death his widow became the wife of the remarkable and unfortunate Jacob Leisler. Among those concerned in real estate transactions in the immediate vicinity of Wall Street during this year, we find such well-known names as Verplanck, Beechman, Kip, Duyckinck, De la Montague, Rutgersen, Ten Eyck, Bayard, Brouwer, and Van Cortlandt. On the 25th of August, Allard Anthony and Oloff Stevenson Van Cortlandt, sold to Vanderveen a piece of property which is thus described:
"A lot west of the Great Highway (Broadway), bounded north by the Company's Garden, and south by lot of Oloff Stevensen Van Cortlandt; width on the street or east side three rods and two feet, and in the rear on North River, or west side, three rods three and one-fifth feet. Depth on south side twenty-one and one-half rods, and on the north side twenty-one rods eight feet. Being premises conveyed by Rt. Hon. Director-General Petrus Stuyvesant to said Anthony and Van Cortlandt, Burgomasters of the city, 9th May, 1656."
These lots were then valued at prices ranging from fifty to one hundred dollars each. The wall was usually spoken of as "The Cingel," the Dutch term for "Ramparts." The map illustrates the general plan of the city as it unfolded in that eventful decade [2] There is little evidence that the soil was at any time tilled between the town and the "Ramparts," except for gardening purposes. In the lower part of Pearl Street some forty-three houses had appeared—surrounded, in some instances, by pretentious grounds, and a few small shops. Jan Vinge lived in a farm-house about the present corner of William and Pine Streets, and must have given his attention to agriculture, judging from the court records, for he instituted several suits for damages done his cabbage-patches and pea-vines by school boys running through them. The City Court of Magistrates formed an august tribunal in their supervision of public affairs. It was the duty of the Schout to personally perambulate the city, and enter complaints against all such miscreants as disregarded police regulations. We find him in frequent collisions with disorderly and unruly persons. One Jasper Abrahamson was arrested for forcibly entering a house and demanding with
- ↑ An exquisitely beautiful gold chatelaine, worn at this period by Mrs. Peter Vanderveen, was in a somewhat romantic manner discovered in 1875, in possession of one of her descendants, in Newark, New Jersey, by the author, and an engraving of it made, by permission, for The History of the City of New York. Vol. I., p. 251.
- ↑ The earliest known map of New York (1664), rescued from the European archives by George H. Moore, LL.D. This map is apparently derived from the same survey as the elaborately colored map familiarly known among historical scholars as "The Duke's Plan," and is believed to be the more correct of the two.—Ed.
